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Heap up gold, gather together silver, raise up walks, fill your house with slaves and the town with debtors; if you do not appease the disorders of your own mind, and stint your unsatiable desire, and deliver yourself from fears and cares, you do but rack wine for a man in a fever, and administer honey to a man disturbed with bile, and prepare meat and good cheer for people that have the flux or gripes, who can neither retain it nor be strengthened by it, but are over and above spoiled by it. Do you not see how sick persons loathe, spit out, and refuse the finest and most costly meats, though they be proffered and forced upon them; and how again, when their complexion alters, and good spirits, sweet blood, and a connatural heat are engendered, they get up and gladly and willingly eat brown bread, cheese, and cresses? Such a disposition as this is it that reason works in the mind. And you will have sufficiency, if you will but learn what a notable and generous mind is. You will live luxuriously in poverty, and be a prince; and you will be as much in love with a vacant and private life as with that of a general or king. If you once apply to philosophy, you will never live without pleasure, but you will learn to be everywhere pleased, and with every thing. You will be pleased with wealth for making you beneficial to many, and with poverty for not having much to care for; with fame for being honored, and with obscurity for being unenvied.
